E. Doctorow: Homer & Langley

And when I lost my sight he read to me.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. If I could go crazy, if I could will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful is this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother’s hand to know that I am not alone.

JACQUELINE, FOR HOW many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?

E. L. DOCTOROW’s work is published in over thirty languages. His novels include The March, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks , and City of God . He has published two short story collections, Lives of the Poets and Sweet Land Stories , and three volumes of essays, the most recent of which is Creationists . Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York.